We downed Illidan: an awesome achievement. But this means Sunwell is no longer a place far away where guilds like EG alone raid. Once we get geared up a bit Vigilantes will also enter the Sunwell and as such we need to prepare for it. Healing in Sunwell is far more difficult than anything we've done up to now.

Up to now you've all been stacking stamina mana regen and heal mostly and this was indeed the way to go for BT and MH. For Sunwell this will not do. Sunwell isn't about how big your heals are but about pure and simple raw HPS (healing per second). You need lightning fast healing there without cancelling spells, with precasting (NO reactive healing anymore) and they need to land in time. You can feel where this is heading to => Spellhaste.

There's is little difference between a 5700 and a 6000 heal landing on the MT but there is a huge difference between a 5700 casted in 2.3 sec and a 6000 in 2.5 seconds. The first case will result in longer living tanks, the second in larger heal gaps in which Sunwell bunnies decimate the tanks.

The trick to raise HPS is spellhaste: 1 point of spellhaste will make your HPS go up twice as fast as 1 point of healing will do, and as an added bonus it lowers your global cooldown (GCD) and the casting time of spells

I'll use myself as example:
If I empty 1 trinket slot my Gheal has 2569 HPS and Fheal has 1960 HPS
If I now add 84 Healing my Gheal has 2615 and Fheal has 1997 HPS
If I add 40 spellhaste trinket it becomes : Gheal 2630 HPS and Fheal 2007 HPS and as added bonus the Gheal is now also cast 0.05 seconds faster and Fheal is 0.03 seconds faster.
=> As you can see spellhaste not only has a very big effect on your HPS it also lowers casttimes and GCD. So once you have enough raw ehaling power you should switch to stacking haste instead of stacking heal even further.

Ompi and me have been experimenting alot with spellhaste and we're extremely pleased with the effects. It's time everyone else starts to add it to their gear. Without spellhaste we are gonna make Sunwell alot harder. Talk to your classleaders or me to see how we can adapt your gear to add in spellhaste. It is no longer a 'nice-to-have' but a 'must-have' if we are to venture beyond Illidan. As such i'd also ask no longer to ignore every item with spellhaste on it. HPS and spellhaste is the way to go now if we want to succeed in Sunwell.

Speaking for priests only now: once you reach about 2200 healing UNbuffed stacking further healing becomes mostly useless and you should switch to spellhaste instead. As a rule of thumb you should consider ALL yellow gem slots to be spellhaste and no longer 11 heal 5 int. Blue/red are best 11 heal 5 spi. 22 heal gems aren't advised as stacking haste will affects mana regen in a negative way. Don't completely nerf all your stats to for haste but aim for 100 spellhaste to start with, that'll reduce gheal casttime to 2.35 which is a very significant change allready.

If you want to see how different gemming changes your gear I recomment the following site: http://www.chardev.org/?c : At the armory input tab you can load your char from the armory. Then use the Character Sheet tab to alter gear gems enchants and such around. On the spelltab you'll be able to see how this affects your spells.